Saturday, March 3, 2012

I have about given up trying to delineate the gulf that separates the left from the right in this country. With every passing day of every week, it becomes wider and wider.

Talking about it does no good, either. To the left, a person from the right talking about their agenda, and describing what it does in no uncertain terms, is engaging in insults and opprobrium, therefore does not deserve a fair hearing, and should be silenced. They cannot understand in any objective way what the criticism of their agenda actually is. And the left is incapable of even entertaining an initiative, if it comes from the right.

The result is an ever-widening gulf. What is scary is that as their separation increases, neither side seems willing to try to reverse the trend. Each is pushing the extreme without any interest in accommodating the other.

Want examples? Start with Obamacare, and the following justification for her recently announced directives to all insurers to provide contraceptive and abortion coverage by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a House panel Thursday that a reduction in the number of human beings born in the United States will compensate employers and insurers for the cost of complying with the new HHS mandate that will require all health-care plans to cover sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives, including those that cause abortions.

“The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for the cost of contraception,” Sebelius said. She went on to say the estimated cost is “down not up.”

“So you are saying, by not having babies born, we are going to save money on health care?” Murphy asked.

Sebelius replied, “Providing contraception is a critical preventive health benefit for women and for their children.”

Murphy again sought clarification.

“Not having babies born is a critical benefit. This is absolutely amazing to me. I yield back,” he said.

Sebelius responded, “Family planning is a critical health benefit in this country, according to the Institute of Medicine.”

What is the gulf here? I will spell it out: for the left, contraception and abortion are critical methods of "family planning" in order to limit family size. It becomes "rational" to them, therefore, to provide such methods at no cost. And if insurers have to provide coverage for fewer and fewer people from cradle to grave in the future, it will cost them less. So they will be willing (the reasoning goes) to provide now for contraception and abortion "at no cost to their insureds."

(There is one slight problem with this reasoning, which another Republican legislator pointed out: if it is in the insurance companies' interest to provide abortion and contraception coverage at no cost, then why aren't they providing that coverage for free now? Why does the Government have to order them to provide it?)

For the right, however, the population trends in advanced countries are already alarming. Europe and Japan are on a decline which will soon be irreversible, and which will lead to their essential irrelevance in a little over fifty years. The United States teeters on the edge of not replacing with new births each year the members of society which it loses through death; it is saved from absolute decline only by its high rate of immigration. But if the Sebelius policies kick in as intended, the United States will be shoved into joining Europe and Japan on the road to extinction, in a world dominated by Chinese, Indians and Muslims.

Result: the left sees nothing wrong in encouraging abortion and contraception as a means of shrinking future population growth. The right sees the left's policy as ensuring the decline of America (to say nothing -- at least, when it comes to abortion as a means of birth control -- of being immoral).

How does one begin to try to bridge this gap? I for one see no possible way. One side is going to have to gain power, and stay in power long enough, to make its policies irreversible after they become entrenched enough.

The problem is that the left's policies are a one-way ratchet: once the country is bankrupt and childless, there will be no rescue except through revolution. The right's policies, on the other hand, are always capable of being reversed by the next election -- because they do not depend on the entrenchment of government. They instead seek to maximize individual liberty and freedom, and there will always be those who will want to curb such things in "the interests of society as a whole."

The result is that, for the right, every election is a brand-new battle, to defend territory previously won from being taken away. But for the left, each time they prevail in an election offers an opportunity for further encroachment on individual liberties (think: first toilets, then light bulbs, and now religious freedom), with the result that it becomes harder and harder to reverse course.

So there will be no bridges between left and right, for the foreseeable future. The left wants nothing of the right's cockamamie notions, and the last thing the right wants to do is compromise with the left's policies in order to have just a little less of them.

I believe you are mistaken about two things. First, who exactly encourages abortion as a form of family planning? I don't think I know anyone who is pro-choice who thinks that abortion is an effective way of family planning. It was used that way in the Soviet Union, but I don't think that it's a common idea here in the US.

Secondly, which part of the the Affordable Health Care for America Act mandates abortion?

Bill Dilworth, I shall try to answer your questions as straightforwardly as you asked them.

1. ". . . who exactly encourages abortion as a form of family planning?"

First, by using only the word "contraception", Kathleen Sebelius tries to skirt the heavier issues that surround the word "abortion", but in the eyes of her Department (HHS), they achieve the same goal: they "reduce the number of pregnancies". "Family planning" is a euphemism for "reducing the number of [unwanted] pregnancies."

HHS and Sebelius have mandated, by administrative fiat, that all insurers must provide coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients without cost in every health policy they offer, starting in August 2012. (Religious institutions offering insurance -- churches, but not religious hospitals or K-12 schools -- are exempt from the requirement for one year, until August 2013.)

Providing a "morning after" pill in your insurance coverage -- i.e., the insurance has to pay for it, and Obamacare prohibits them even from charging a copay for such "women's health care" services -- is, at least in my book, encouraging abortion as a means of reducing unwanted pregnancies, i.e., "family planning."

2. ". . . which part of the the Affordable Health Care for America Act mandates abortion?"

Excellent question! If, that is, you mean "mandates insurance coverage for abortion." (The federal government has not yet taken the step of following China and forcing abortions to keep down the size of families.) For the dirty secret is that there is no language in the Act which anywhere mandates specifically that such insurance be provided. Instead, the law speaks only in generalities -- insurers must provide "recommended preventive services" free of any copay requirements, including "women's preventive health services."

Well, guess what? It is the Secretary of HHS whom the law authorizes to specify just what services are "recommended." So Secretary Sebelius decided to mandate coverage for free contraceptives and abortion pills by regulations adopted under the authority of the Act. (That's why Nancy Pelosi famously said that we would have to wait until the bill was passed to be able to see what was in it.) If you want more details on this, please click on this link.

So the morning after pill is an "abortifacient," that's the reasoning for conflating contraception and abortion?

The problem with this is you're going to have to rewrite the definition of either abortion or pregnancy to make it fit. Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy, and pregnancy starts not at fertilization, but at implantation. What Plan B (the morning after pill) does is prevent implantation.

If you believe that a fertilized egg is a human being, I can see your problem. But then again if you believe that, you might also have a problem with the fact that up to 50% of fertilized eggs fail to implant naturally, and pass out of the woman's body. What kind of a universe is it if up to half of the souls created by God never make it past the egg stage - by design? And if it's truly the case that these fertilized eggs are human beings, what is the Church's responsibility towards them? Do we need to develop technology to detect such eggs easily once they've been passed so that, like stillborn children, we can give them Christian funerals? Stillborn children are sometimes baptized; do we need to extend that practice to zygotes?

Bill Dilworth, I respectfully submit that it is you (along with many other supporters of abortifacients who contend that they are just another kind of contraceptive) who are rewriting the medical definition of pregnancy.

A woman is medically "pregnant" when her egg has been fertilized to become a zygote. Implantation in the wall of the uterus -- which is necessary for the zygote's continued nutrition and development -- is an entirely separate event, which occurs 7 to 8 days after fertilization.

Because the zygote can develop elsewhere than just in the uterus, the definition of "pregnancy" does not depend on what you are describing as uteral implantation. (For an expert pharmaceutical explanation of how abortifacients work to prevent implantation -- and to terminate a pregnancy that began a week or so earlier -- see this link.)

It is perfectly true that zygotes which fail to implant naturally are never afterwards heard of -- but that does not change the all-important distinction you are blurring, between naturally terminated pregnancies (which can occur at any time throughout a woman's term, up to and including stillbirth), and human-terminated ones. The former are indeed in God's hands; the latter are the result of humans presuming to play God.

Those who exalt "science" over all else are also those who are most tempted by the marvels of science to place their knowledge on a level with God's. One cannot at the same time believe in God and want to occupy His place in nature. There is only one God, and no mere man is His equivalent.

Of course, if you do not believe in God, you may believe whatever you want. I merely point out here what limitations on human knowledge (and hence on human actions) belief in God necessarily entails. As G.K. Chesterton once said, "People who do not believe in God will believe in anything."

"The right's policies, on the other hand, are always capable of being reversed by the next election -- because they do not depend on the entrenchment of government. They instead seek to maximize individual liberty and freedom, "

I'd like to introduce you to the patriot act - an entirely 'right' policy that has done irreparable harm to our republic.

Please stop being fooled by the 'left-right' paradigm. This isn't red v blue. This is Government v Citizens... the divide is between the taxers and the taxed. Both sides of the isle are quite happy to destroy America for temporary political gains.

Abortion - contraception... how can we expect to have a moral voice in the matter, when we allow our wives / children to be porno-scanned or felt up when traveling by air (coming soon to a highway near you!)

Yes the Dems are bad - they are outright wolves. The Repubs are worse, they are wolves in sheep's clothing.

I'm not rewriting anything; I quoted the definition of pregnancy used by the National Institutes of Health and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

I'm not sure what the relevance of your references to belief in God are in the context of this discussion. Christians have held a wide variety of belief about abortion and human personhood. Claiming one position as *the* Christian one is unwarranted. See this essay by a medical ethicist for details: http://home.earthlink.net/~davidlperry/abortion.htm

And you still haven't answered my question the implications for the Church of believing that personhood begins at fertilization. Zygotes that fail to implant, as well as some miscarried embryos, do pass out of the woman's body unnoticed, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case; theoretically, we could develop technology to detect them, couldn't we? If there is no difference in personhood between a zygote and a newborn baby, why aren't we concerned with according them the same amount of respect when they die?

RMBIV, you are correct that there is not any real difference between Republicans and Democrats in power. But that means only that Republicans are not entitled to the label of being on the right. They long since joined the Democrats in making Alexis de Tocqueville's prophecy come true:

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

He also famously said: "There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle." That is still true, too.

Nevertheless, there is still a meaningful distinction to be made between left and right. To paraphrase another observation by de Tocqueville: "[The right] and [the left] have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while [the right] seeks equality in liberty, [the left] seeks equality in restraint and servitude."

Your distinction between the taxers and the taxed is the same one, essentially. Notice how it is the taxers (Geithner, Rangel, Kerry et al.) who somehow manage to be the ones to escape paying what they impose on others?

The Patriot Act, by the way, was not a product of the right, but of the attack hysteria following 9/11. It passed by a vote of 357 to 66 in the House, and by 98 to 1 in the Senate. And it was recently extended (in certain respects) for four years by President Obama.

In light of my last comment to RMBIV, I see I have to clarify what I meant by the closing remark of my post: "The 2012 election will be a watershed for this country's future."

How can I say this if I think there is no essential difference between Democrats and Republicans? Two responses:

1) To re-elect Obama will be fatal for our country, because of socialism's one-way ratchet, mentioned in the post. There will be no going back after Obama's second term!

2) To elect a Republican -- even a RINO like Mitt Romney -- will be our only chance to slow down the leftist juggernaut. And despite the media's bandwagon, it is far from certain, at this point in time, that the Republican candidate in 2012 will not be better than Romney (perhaps even a dark horse).

The point is: a vote for Obama will be a vote for no hope, ever again. A vote for his opponent will at least offer the chance of hope -- and then the rest will be up to us.

Bill Dilworth, you won't get anywhere here by citing the NHI or the ACOG. They make a point of excluding considerations of God from their decisions and policies; as a Christian, I am unable to do so. As this Wikipedia article explains, the ACOG explicitly adopted your "definition" at the suggestion of one of its members in 1959, who foresaw exactly that it would make it easier to talk of "preventing" pregnancy than of "terminating" it.

Also, anyone can play games with context, be it the Bible or whatever. The message of the Bible in honoring life is unmistakable, and it nowhere makes the distinction between being born and being still in the womb -- the same Hebrew word describes both states, and it is the same word ("ben") which means "child."

Why is God relevant to this discussion? Because a zygote is life, innocent life to boot, and only God may claim an innocent life, made in His image, for reasons only He can know. If Job could not hope to judge God, who are we to claim to do so?

Your proposal to monitor and try to rescue all zygotes (as opposed to blastocysts) would be to play God every bit as much as to say that we "modern-minded" folk should be able to decide when to terminate pregancies -- that is why I did not take you up on it.

RMBIV, please forgive me for not being clear. The Republican candidate has not been selected yet; people can still work to see that it is not Mitt Romney. I did not say to vote for Romney as such; I advocated voting for Obama's opponent -- and that does not necessarily mean the Republican one. (It depends on whom they eventually nominate -- if it's Paul Ryan, for example, then they will have my vote.)

The point is to vote for the best candidate, as you say, and not on the basis of who is likely to win. But that being said, we know that in a primarily two-party system such as ours, all you can do by not voting for either major party candidate is deny them your vote; you cannot keep one of them from being elected, because the vast majority of the electorate does not think as you do (because they have been bribed with their own money).

My point in my comment was more prosaic: if by next fall, the two-party choices are between D-Obama and R-Romney, then if Obama is chosen, the country will certainly be lost. If the voters pick Romney, the country may still be lost, but at least it would not be as certain (hope does spring eternal, after all).

I'm not sure why it's particularly important that the ACOG definition was adopted half a century ago. It's the definition that the federal government - even during the administrations of Presidents who touted their "pro-life" stance - has long used.

If the Bible were as clear as you claim it is, you would expect that both the Church and the common law would always have viewed personhood as beginning at the same point. As the link I provided shows, that's not the case at all, and there has not been one single Christian teaching about the beginnings of personhood, but several. If it is an incontrovertible Bible teaching that zygotes and blastocysts (although not under those names, of course) are fully human persons, why did it take so long to discern that? Neither St. Augustine nor St. Thomas Aquinis, for example, taught that unborn children were fully persons from the beginning of their development. Up until the 19th century, abortion after quickening was a serious offense, while abortion before quickening was seen as a much less serious affair. Did any Anglican authority ever protest that view? Until quite recently, did any Christian tradition - Roman, Anglican or other - treat miscarried and aborted embryos and fetuses as dead persons by giving them funerals?

You seem to have misunderstood my point about the implications of considering fertilized eggs as fully human persons, since I neither wrote nor intended to imply that we should be "rescuing" them.

Bill Dilworth: "I'm not sure why it's particularly important that the ACOG definition was adopted half a century ago."

You missed my point. It's not when it was adopted; it's why. They were explicit that they wanted to be able to interrupt implantation without being charged with "terminating" a pregnancy. Call it what you will -- by making it impossible for the zygote to become a blastocyst after a week or so of life, it is an artificially produced termination of pregnancy -- i.e., an abortion. You don't accept that point, so we are not going to make any further progress discussing it.

"If the Bible were as clear as you claim it is, you would expect that both the Church and the common law would always have viewed personhood as beginning at the same point."

Not so -- the Bible is not a science textbook. As the Wikipedia article I cited earlier states, the fact that fertilization occurred when a spermatozoon penetrated an ovum was not established until 1875. And you expect a uniform view of personhood before that point? Aquinas and St. Augustine had no concept of how it occurred, and so their pronouncements cannot be treated as definitive.

But now that we today know how the process works, and know that a zygote contains everything needed to become (with appropriate nutrients) a human person, then Christians have to accept moral responsibility for the lives they create. To kill them before their time is murder.

Anything less than that is a slippery moral slope. For you, sentencing a zygote to an early death is still "contraception"; for still others even more enlightened, it is permissible to kill a newborn infant if they judge that its "quality of life" is not up to par (think: Down's syndrome).

Christians cannot be faulted for refusing to go where you would like them to go. If you can find any who will, that does not make the rest of us "wrong," or Christianity "unclear." Morality is ultimately something that God will judge, and so each individual has to be responsible for his or her own actions. (It won't be an excuse to say: "Well, so-and-so thought it was all right.")

Earlier you asked: "What kind of a universe is it if up to half of the souls created by God never make it past the egg stage - by design?"

First off, you assume without any proof that "souls" immediately enter a zygote upon fertilization -- I don't know how science could ever prove that, so I think you are inventing a straw man. If science cannot even prove that souls exist, I fail to see how one can rationalize killing a zygote by saying it does not yet have a soul. One could never know, and so it is best to err on the side of sustaining, and not terminating, life. Let the souls, in other words, see to themselves; they have been doing it for centuries on end.

As for providing them with "funerals" or posthumous "baptism", surely you jest. If not, then you must see that the technology to detect their presence in the menses would involve an invasion of the person and privacy far out of proportion to what you are proposing to accomplish.

Of course, abort means to terminate a mission or process by active measures. The morning-after pill is certainly a form of abortion. Also, the Patriot Act was not a rightwing thing. It was part of a foolish, instinctive urge by a group of liberal Republicans and Democrats who are all either liberals or out and out national socialists, progressives, or marxists (by their own self-description) to increase the size, scope, and authority of central government. It is chromozomally programmed in their blood. The entire TSA madness, the Patriot Act, and the "Homeland Security Department" was all a useless rush to spend more money and extend more authority. The same objectives could have been accomplished with fewer, separate bureaucracies and bureaucrats. The outcomes would have been better, and cheaper.

The Anglican Curmudgeon is entirely correct about this issue of the gulf between left and right. But what is the Right to do? Every program the left lauds and magnifies was designed essentially to use as a sledgehammer so as to scare the heeby jeebies out of geezers...."The Republicans are going to take away your Social Security....your Medicare...your free this and that!" And to scare the "poor"...the "poor" that were created into and maintained within their poverty by the same programs upon which they depend.Food Stamps, AFDC, Head Start,SSI, Section 8, public housing, WIC, unemployment compensation, etc. All the programs designed to "help" people actually enslave them and give us scenes like New Orleans....the ultimate Gommorah. So, how can we compromise if we wish better for the black man than the slavery of dependency? The Democrats are cynical and condescentious, as if their programs were ever intended to do any other than train people to trundle down to vote for their dole, and to put Maxine Waters in a big house....All the Nagins, all the Shiela Jackson Lees, almost all of them....demagogues and draculas. The drug war in Mexico is frequently mentioned as something too dreadful to imagine because 45,000 people have been killed during the past five and a half years...most were actually cockroaches killing cockroaches, about 90%, and 10% were actually human beings...soldiers, honest and semi-honest cops...children and women, working men caught in a cross fire. BUT, just think. With three times the population, the United States has had four times as many killed in the same period of time. Some 190,000 in 6 years....largely black young men born into the concept of "baby mothers" and the absence of any form of catechism except that of Lucifer's call to the worship of death and self-destruction. Latin gangs proliferate, spawned mainly by AFDC, and Anglo meth-nuts round out the mess. All sons of Lucifer. All brought to us by those who start off with,"A child cannot study if he is hungry"...and so we put the school lunch program into place, and breakfast, and summer feeding and food stamps and food banks and thanksgiving turkey meals for the "poor"....And now we have diabetes, and the Republicans and George Bush would rather "give subsidies to their rich friends than to have a program that will help these poor children with diabetes"....says Nancy Pelosi. How can anyone argue with a person who lectures the Bishop of Rome concerning matters of canon of the Roman Church?

Please forgive me, Rev. Mr. Curmudgeon. I drone forth to excess. But it is because I agree with you. I am in a dark cave and see no exit. I know the socialist, and no good flows from his acts, only misery and bondage. There is no hope, and the result never changes. Hitler, Pot, Ho, Mao, Fidel, Uncle Joe,Barak; they are all sons of Lucifer. How can we compromise with Lucifer?

"The entire TSA madness, the Patriot Act, and the "Homeland Security Department" was all a useless rush to spend more money and extend more authority. The same objectives could have been accomplished with fewer, separate bureaucracies and bureaucrats. The outcomes would have been better, and cheaper."

This is where the Right gets it wrong. I agree 100% with your first sentence, but instead of taking the opportunity to stand up for liberty and a 'no new government' position, you compromise with 'separate bureaucracies - for better / cheaper'. The cheapest would be no government, and the best outcome is the starving of the leviathan - but the 'right' never sees that as an option.

You bring up the war on drugs. American has the highest incarceration rate of any 1st world nation - in large part because of the rights (failed) war on drugs. The right will hang onto that boondoggle until its dying day.

I have always identified with the 'right', but the right needs to re-examine some of its long held beliefs and jettison its big government, pro-war, anti-drug positions; and embrace positions of peace... even if people decide to do things you personally disagree with.

The reference to the discovery of the mechanics of fertilization is besides the point. Augustine and Aquinas didn't know about fertilization, but they certainly knew that there was development of the fetus before the point at which they considered it to be a person. It's immaterial whether or not they thought it was a combination of paternal semen and maternal blood that provided the body, or whether they thought the father simply planted the seed which grew into a fetus, or whether they knew that the ovum is penetrated by a sperm cell - they taught that fetus was not a person until quickening. The mechanics of how the body develops before that point do not touch on personhood.

You seem to want to have it both ways. On the one hand, you demure as to whether or not zygotes have souls (which as far as I can tell is how Christianity defines being a person - the combination of body and soul), but on the other hand you lament them as innocents sentenced to die. If they are not persons, then their deaths are not at all what you are characterizing them to be.

I'd still like to know if any CofE theologians explicitly taught that abortion before quickening was murder before the 19th century.

Bill Dilworth, with your attempt to mischaracterize the "Christian position" on abortion by referring only to Sts. Augustine and Aquinas, you have carried this discussion too far afield from the main post, and so I cannot honor any more comments here on this subtopic.

I will close by furnishing you with some additional links which refute your points -- admittedly at some length, but that is what your argument requires.

First, to see how you are simply repeating the mistaken assumptions of your source (as well as those of Nancy Pelosi) regarding St. Augustine's views, please read this article by a Catholic bishop, which cites and draws on one of the definitive studies of his huge body of work.

Next, to see how the Catholic Church's views on abortion have gone back and forth, based on the degree of influence which Aristotle had on various Church fathers (including Augustine and Aquinas) from time to time, here is a very useful overview.

And those are just the views of the Roman Catholic Church. To give you similar citations for the historical views of other denominations would be far more work than you would appreciate. However, I would refer you in general to the article on "Abortion in Antiquity" in a standard religious reference work, such as the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary.

But I trust that the last link satisfies your demand to see whether any " . . . theologians explicitly taught that abortion before quickening was murder before the 19th century." I count at least eleven who so held before the fifth century.

As I say, we will have to end the public discussion here. If you want to tell me anything more, please send me an email.

Due to poor writing on the part of El Gringo Viejo, he made it difficult to understand that he does not endorse the expansion or even the maintenance of the present size of the Central Government. He is on record elsewhere as being in favour of the abolition of the Departments of Energy, Labour, Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, FEMA, ATF&E,and for the privatisation of Social Security and Medicare. In his perfect world, Fannie and Freddie would underwrite no further mortgages, and the EPA would close its door within the next 90 days. The only point was to do the job of retribution to the "evil doers" to specialised military and police groups that were and are already in existence.

It would be his pleasure as well to have only male priests, a restoration of the 1928 Book, a quiet sanctuary before Mass, no unconfirmed children taking communion, women wearing those elegant hats and mantillas again, and so forth. So, you see, there are so many Windmills and so little of me. However, it is noticed that you are from Minneapolis. My great-grandfather Peter Bonesteel Chistian, and his daughter Esther Lee Christian are buried in the Hennepin County Cemetery, near the old Saint Anthony section of town, I believe. They were members at Saint Marks. They both died long before my birth. The Christian family was heavily involve in the grain processing and other industries from the 1860s up to th present even perhaps. We have never had contact with them.

Thanks everyone for their indulgence and time. This place is one of refuge and comfort.Peace to Men of Goodwill.El Gringo Viejo

"It would be his pleasure as well to have only male priests, a restoration of the 1928 Book, a quiet sanctuary before Mass, no unconfirmed children taking communion, women wearing those elegant hats and mantillas again, and so forth."

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